Viacom, YouTube air dirty laundry in legal battle

This image shows the YouTube Web site Thursday March 18, 2010, in Los Angeles. Court documents unsealed Thursday as part of a 3-year-old copyright lawsuit against the online video leader reveal YouTube founders' views on copyright, and Viacom's desire to buy the the site before getting beat out by Google. (AP Photo/Richard Vogel)
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This image shows the YouTube Web site Thursday March 18, 2010, in Los Angeles. Court documents unsealed Thursday as part of a 3-year-old copyright lawsuit against the online video leader reveal YouTube founders' views on copyright, and Viacom's desire to buy the the site before getting beat out by Google. (AP Photo/Richard Vogel)
/ AP

FILE - In this April 20, 2007 file photo, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen attends the Committee of 100 Conference in New York. Chen once warned a fellow co-founder to stop posting pirated videos on their Web site, according to court documents unsealed Thursday, March 18, 2010 as part of a 3-year-old copyright lawsuit against the online video leader. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, File)— AP

FILE - In this April 20, 2007 file photo, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen attends the Committee of 100 Conference in New York. Chen once warned a fellow co-founder to stop posting pirated videos on their Web site, according to court documents unsealed Thursday, March 18, 2010 as part of a 3-year-old copyright lawsuit against the online video leader. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, File)
/ AP

SAN FRANCISCO 
Viacom Inc. and Google Inc.'s YouTube site began airing each other's dirty laundry Thursday, providing a tantalizing peek at the wheeling and dealing that triggered a bitter battle over the copyright laws governing the Internet.

The previously confidential information came out as part of the evidence in a copyright lawsuit that Viacom filed against YouTube in 2007 for alleged copyright infringement of "The Colbert Report," "The Daily Show" and other shows.

The sensitive documents were unsealed because Viacom and YouTube are both trying to persuade U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton to decide the case without a trial.

Both YouTube and Viacom are getting muddied in the process.

Internal YouTube e-mails depict at least one of the company's founders as a video pirate and suggest the Web site's employees were more interested in getting rich quick than adhering to copyright laws.

Other records show Viacom wanted to buy YouTube at least seven months before it filed its lawsuit and often used the Web site to promote the shows on its cable TV programming.

Google bought YouTube for $1.76 billion in November 2006, but not before Viacom made a last-ditch effort to persuade Google to team up in a joint bid for the Web's leading video site, according to the court documents. A few months later, Google offered to pay Viacom $590 million for licensing rights to video, according to the records.

Viacom, the owner of Paramount Pictures and cable TV channels that include Comedy Central, instead sued Google and YouTube in a complaint seeking more than $1 billion in damages.

The media company alleges that YouTube allowed copyright-protected clips to appear on its Web site in its early days to attract a bigger audience. YouTube maintains it has always obeyed online copyright laws, which generally protect service providers from copyright claims as long as they didn't post the infringing material themselves and promptly remove it when notified about a violation.

But an e-mail exchange among YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim showed there were in-house copyright abuses.

"Jawed, please stop putting stolen videos on the site," Chen wrote in the July 19, 2005, e-mail. "We're going to have a tough time defending the fact that we're not liable for the copyrighted material on the site because we didn't put it up when one of the co-founders is blatantly stealing content from other sites and trying to get everyone to see it."

In a statement after the documents were unsealed, YouTube said Chen's e-mail was referring to some aviation videos that had been making the rounds on the Web. "The exchange has nothing to do with supposed piracy of media content," YouTube said.

Karim left YouTube before Google bought it in 2006. But he kept YouTube e-mail on his personal computer, enabling Viacom to obtain correspondence that Hurley had said he lost, according to court documents.

In a July 29, 2005 e-mail, Chen advised Hurley and Karim to "steal it!" in an apparent reference to an unidentified video clip, according to the court documents. After Hurley asked if he wanted to steal movies, Chen replied, "haha ya. Or something."